Nothing We Don't Already Know

Sorry John.St. I wasn't ignoring your question, just got home.
No reason to apologize, nobody is obliged to answer, and in particular not within a few hours :)

Let me try and shed some light on why I make that point: I don't think Stalin, Lenin, Mao, or other famous communist party leaders were really communists.
We totally agree. They used the unwashed millions, same as e.g. Adolf and Musso, to build their own powerbase and might as well have called themselves Popes.

My main point is that communist parties (well most of them) of the 20th century tried to be communist, but it proved to be too difficult, and morphed into something that likely caused Marx to rollover in his grave: bureaucratic nightmares so obsessed with forcing their political philosophy down peoples throats and controlling everyones behaviors/actions/thoughts so that they could starve off revolution for another year, the nations literally crumbled from the inside out. They simply kept the name.
Agreed. The main problem with ideologies is that they are incomplete models of the real world. Their main mistake is to try to change the real world to fit the model instead of changing the model to fit the real world.


I don't believe in communism, and I think, as I've made clear before, that democratic socialism is the best political philosophy because communism,like Peronism, has the unquenchable urge to control so much of society, economics, and even history that it strangles the life out of everything it touches.
Raw communism and raw capitalism suffer from equally huge problems in each its own end of the scale.

Unfortunately democratic socialism has the same problem as any other arrangement of a society. When it grows old, it detoriates to senile rule autocracy, but for the time being it seems to be the least bad alternative.
 
No reason to apologize, nobody is obliged to answer, and in particular not within a few hours :)

.................democratic socialism ...... it seems to be the least bad alternative.

Can you give an example of a successful democratic socialist country?
 
Can you give an example of a successful democratic socialist country?
Let's see ...
Norway, one of the richest countries per capita in the world, Denmark, Sweden, Finland.
They all work with capitalism within limits, socialism within limits.
You can check them out on e.g. https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/

These 4 countries are also nos. 8 (N), 5 (DK), 7 (S) and 13 (SF) on Forbes' world rank list of countries to do business in. (The US is no. 10)
http://www.forbes.com/lists/2011/6/best-countries-11_rank.html
 
Let's see ...
Norway, one of the richest countries per capita in the world, Denmark, Sweden, Finland.
They all work with capitalism within limits, socialism within limits.
You can check them out on e.g. https://www.cia.gov/...world-factbook/

These 4 countries are also nos. 8 (N), 5 (DK), 7 (S) and 13 (SF) on Forbes' world rank list of countries to do business in. (The US is no. 10)
http://www.forbes.co...es-11_rank.html

It would probably be more accurate to call these countries "social democracies" that have achieved a balance of free market and public sector priorities.
 
Meanwhile, in the US....

14 year old kids are now beaten and arrested by the police for giving them "dehumanizing stares".
You can't make this stuff up. Video included.

Miami police put 14-year-old in choke hold for ‘dehumanizing stares’
Yes, hundreds of them - or was it 1 (one)? in which case it is 'kid', not 'kids'.
Besides: he wasn't beaten - read your own ref.

You should have watched the included video. Where does it show a boy being thrown to the ground and/or choked?
It seems totally unrelated to the incident. His mother captured the arrest on her cell phone camera - let's see it, then we'll know.
 
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